Day 12 – The Drei Zinnen View

Today’s Blog Entry

Cindy and I decided to take advantage of the excellent cross-country skiing facilities for our last outing in Dobbiaco. The lack of recent snow has made it tough for the groomers to open new trails or keep the existing ones usable, thus our decision to focus this trip on winter hiking. That said we couldn’t go home without enjoying at least one day on skis, so we saved it for our finale.

The good news is that some of the signature trails in the area, like the Dobbiaco to Cortina ‘Tour De Ski’, are in well-shaded valleys and are in nice shape thanks to the heavy storms that hit this area earlier in the season. The Tour de Ski runs south through the pass from Dobbiaco to Cortina and traverses some beautiful terrain. If you only ski one trail in the area, this should be it.

We started out with a walk from our apartment southward through town to the Nordic Arena. There we rented cross-country skis, boots, and poles for the day. We put on our gear and much to our delight managed to get out of the Arena without falling down in front of everybody – it’s been four years since we last did any cross-country skiing so you just never know what you will and won’t remember!

The nicely-groomed track took us past Lago di Dobbiaco and more or less parallel to the highway that our bus used earlier this week for our trip up and over the pass to Cortina. The scenery was therefore rather familiar but seemed to go by much more slowly, mostly because this morning’s six miles of skiing was almost entirely uphill. We reached our destination in just over two hours with only one brief stop to shed our outer shells and switch to lighter gloves. In spite of the sub-freezing temperatures we were both roasting from the exertion.

Our destination today was a wayside in the Drei Zinnen Nature Park that we had first spotted on our way to Cortina. This wayside is all about the fantastic view of the Drei Zinnen rock formation and the surrounding mountains. It also features some open fields with groomed cross-country trails as well as the aptly-named Drei Zinnen Blick (Three Peaks View) restaurant.

After checking out the view and taking some pictures (of course!) we walked over to the restaurant, shed our gear, and found an open table on the sun terrace. Our reward for the morning’s unrelenting grind up the pass was a hot lunch and some cold German beer with a stellar view.

After absorbing the view and the sunshine we put our skis back on for the return to Dobbiaco. We had high hopes that the constant uphill grind from the morning would translate to a constant downhill cruise with little or no effort, but those hopes were soon dashed. While the six mile return trip was definitely faster (by about a half-hour) we still found ourselves having to do a fair amount of work. The net result was a physically challenging day with some great memories.

Tomorrow morning we leave Dobbiaco and head north by train for two nights in Innsbruck, Austria. We’ll then spend one more night in Munich as the staging point for our return to reality. Cindy’s found some fun things for us to do in both of these fine European cities, so stay tuned for more updates!

Today’s Map

Today’s Photos

Miscellaneous

The Meals

Breakfast : In the apartment

Lunch : Drei Zinnen Blick

Dinner : In the apartment